Pleistocene Park

I can hear Dr. Ian Malcolm screaming something about life finding a way. This just seems like a worse version of wolves and deer waiting to happen.

www.popularmechanics.com...

The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant, which leads Colossal to believe it’s well on its way toward achieving its goal.

Through gene editing, Colossal scientists will eventually create an embryo of a woolly mammoth. They will place the embryo in an African elephant to take advantage of its size and allow it to give birth to the new woolly mammoth. The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast.

I should think this is cool but all I see is an ironic Darwin Award waiting to happen.

I love the environmental spin to not just say they want to bring an extinct species back to life. Why do you need a thriving population of a dead species brought back to life in selected areas of the arctic. They gonna fight the emaciated polar bears for food?

They should do it and not tell the Inuit in the area thdy are reintroducing them. See what happens. "Well we tried to bring them back but the Eskimos kept eating and making clothing out of them".

Maybe I'm too worse case scenario taking the, "What could possibly go wrong?" mindset.

This just seems like it shouldn't be done.

a reply to: Degradation33

Oh what are you afraid of... "Mammoth Pox"?

I bet they already have that in the works, at least they can do is let us pet a Wooly Mammoth while we wait in line for the next "pandemic" vaxx.

Let them do it. Bring back the sabertooth cats and cave bears too.

If there is a god who wouldn't want us to create, we wouldn't be able to create

What could go wrong?

I can't imagine how half-assed this is going to turn out to be. Resurrect an extinct species to 'revitalize' the arctic? Seriously?

Science steeped in materialism is just nuts. The idea that 'just bring it back' is a principle of evolutionary biology makes my skin crawl. The end of this road is bio-lunacy... The saddest part is our Hollywood-educated public will eat it up as a 'green' effort to 'save the planet.'

These poor animals are going to face problems that none of their non-engineered ancestors faced, like plastic pollutants, different atmospheric components, radically different weather cycles and patterns... and some poor sucker is going to have to 'fund' their stewardship... because it's "green."

Of course this could just be another funding scam/money pit of an idea... while the theory of it is fascinating, the actuality of it just sounds wrong to me.

The first question I would ask is "Do you actually have a plan? Or is this just one of those let's just 'wing it' projects?"

If humans are to blame for an animal's extinction within the last few hundred years, then restoring an extinct species to it's place in nature seems like a good thing to do. However, some species like the passenger pigeon would create some huge problems in today's world, esp. if they were released into an area that they never existed before, like Europe. Some animals like the dodo bird might not be a problem if they were restricted to a few islands and others animals might be OK in Zoos perhaps.

The thing is that they can't even keep simple small endangered species alive like the Monarch butterfly because humans have changed the environment so much and won't fix it. They need the common milkweed to survive and wintering grounds down south. Do you plant milkweeds or have a butterfly shield on your car?

Here in Michigan is where the last known flock of passenger pigeons was sighted. The last greater prairie in Michigan disappeared in the 1980s because the tall grass prairies were destroyed. Now we have the endangered Karner blue butterfly near extinction because no one plants wild lupines that they need. All these species were common to Michigan and the Great Lakes but what did we do then and what do we do now about it? Very little, nothing at all really.

My point is that you need to restore the environment first before you reintroduce a species that was once common to it, be they extinct or extirpated from the area. The entire extinct ecosystem would have to be nearly intact before the highest level animals, like the mega fauna, can be reintroduced. Without that all they would have is some freak show menagerie running wild.

I know frozen mammoths are found in the arctic, but I don't think that means they lived under arctic conditions. I've always heard that they lived in temperate places and were stuck when the planet cooled greatly and went into the ice age.

I think they're starting too big. I would like to see them bring back the Carolina Parakeet. they have a bunch of those in the Smithsonian. I'm sure there are similar species around.

i've always wanted to be some type of geneticist to bring back the Andrewsarchus...think a hyena the size of a Volkswagen beetle...and let them loose because us humans had it good for too long